Over 250 second level students all over Ireland are taking the first round paper of the CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) in their own schools this week.

Following the success of last year's inaugural AILO competition, CNGL invited transition-year, 5th- and 6th-year students in Ireland and Northern Ireland with an interest in languages and good analytical skills to put them together, learn about linguistics, and participate in this fun competition. The winners of the overall AILO individual competition will represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Sweden in July 2010.
Many disciplines such as science, maths, creative writing, and music run competitions to find the most promising young students. A Linguistics Olympiad involves face-to-face competition where teams or individuals have to use their ingenuity, creativity and skill to solve language-related problems. No specialist linguistics knowledge is assumed.

The National Centre for Language Technology and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation are hosting the Machine Translation Marathon (MTM) 2010 at Dublin City University 25-30th January on behalf of the EuroMatrixPlus Consortium, a Machine Translation research project. This is the fourth in a series of MT Marathons in which researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation from all over the world attend lectures and labs introducing them to the latest research in the field.

Over 100 people from more than 20 countries have registered for the event, representing industrial, academic and governmental organisations.

The morning sessions are made up of experts giving introductory lectures on a variety of MT topics followed by presentations of open-source tools from researchers in the field.

In the afternoon, students get an opportunity to work on lab exercises, while more experienced researchers work together on open-source projects.